by Tod Wodicka
“It’s an interesting face.”
“Yeah,” Emily said. But, to be honest, the face had derailed her. She felt bereft. She often felt like this when she thought about Mr. Jeffries. It was almost as if she didn’t know how to miss him. “What is it, Ethan, why are you smiling like that?” Then, fully noting the wine, said, “Oh, no, no, no. I’ve got to work. Later, OK?”
Ethan didn’t budge. “You didn’t check our voice mail,” he said.
“No,” she said. “What?”
Then she knew what.
Ethan placed a glass of wine in Emily’s hand, softly, here. “It’s Italian,” he said. “Florentine. Brunello di Montalcino. It’s made from grapes.” Ethan sipped the wine. “Not quite soju, but I’ll get used to it.”
“Ethan?” Emily was standing.
He shook his head. “I didn’t get the job,” he said, simply. “I’m so proud of you, Emily.”
Seven years later, in Seoul, Emily would learn at a diplomatic dinner party that Ethan hadn’t even applied for the job. He’d been offered it cold. It was so romantic, another diplomat’s wife said, pulling Emily aside, whispering, sideways glancing at Ethan. That he’d been willing to turn down that position, this woman said. It should have killed his career, you know. You guys shouldn’t even be here. The woman made a noise then, a Korean noise that meant love can sure make people do idiotic fucking things but isn’t that the dream? Isn’t it all a dream?
—
Emily hadn’t really spoken to Harriet in a year or so, though they were never too far apart online. Harriet was fond of sudden Google Chat barrages, always irreverent, manic, profane, but never too revealing, and Emily, when she thought about it, would send Harriet updates letting her know that she was thinking about going to Italy, for example, or that she missed her.
For one year, they’d relied on each other, instant BFFs, even if they were rarely in the same place at the same time. When Emily was in Harriet’s calamity NYC sublet, Harriet was in Emily’s Route 29 calamity house. Total hongza-ville. But they talked constantly then, nearly every day, supporting each other through Timmy and Ethan and whatever the hell were they supposed to do now. Sometimes Harriet would come down to NYC and they’d share her small room for a few days or a week, Harriet taking a breather from the middle of nowhere. They’d spend the night watching crap TV, talking through the nature of reality and the rules of beauty, and they’d order Chinese food, sushi, the occasional bottle of vodka. Emily never visited Harriet in Queens Falls.
Then Emily moved to Boston and Harriet moved back to New York City.
The blizzard, which the Weather Channel had given a suitably Old Testament name, had begun shortly after Ethan and Emily left Jamaica Plain for Harriet’s gallery in Manhattan. Jebediah was the end of the world disguised as Christmas Eve. The mute, white lack of highway visibility made everything feel deceptively safe and cozy inside Ethan’s car, like the whole world was a puffy white airbag. You really couldn’t drive more slowly. They listened to a Learn Italian While You Drive set of CDs, Ethan picking it up so quickly that Emily figured he must be cheating.
“How can I be cheating?”
“Your memory is cheating,” Emily said. “I don’t know. Stop it.”
“Grazie per la pizza.”
To even the score, Emily told Ethan all about the latest developments in the study of psychotropic biochemistry. Ethan had some new weird facts about Italy, specifically Roman history, which, not atypically, he’d lately become somewhat obsessed with. Did Emily know about Caligula’s horse? They talked, loosely, about getting married. It’d make their lives easier abroad. Residency papers, visas, taxes, work permits. Then, following the close call of a truck skidding out in front of them, Ethan pulled the car over and they talked, even more loosely, about having sex. They opted for second base.
They were going to be incredibly late.
They got to Chelsea a little after eleven. The opening was to have started at eight. New York City was muffled white; very few cars on the streets. There were cross-country skiers, though, and adults pulling other adults down the sidewalks on sleds. Buried cars created igloos on the sides of the streets.
Ethan dropped Emily off and went searching for a parking garage. The snow clumped on Emily’s face. It went under her sleeves, down her neck. Inside her ears. The gallery was as white as the city outside. It was sparsely crowded, the floor wet, muddy. There didn’t seem to be any art whatsoever.
“Phane!” Harriet Jeffries said. “I can’t believe it’s you, you made it. I mean, how did you make it? You come by bobsled? You look incredible, I love your hair. It’s so—no longer there!”
Emily’s hair was still very much there; it was only shorter. It had been that way for more than a year. But Harriet was off. “You look like a mystical freckled fawn or something. God fucking damn you. So is this mad scientist Emily I’ve been hearing so much about? I love it. I really can’t believe you’re here. But where’s Ethan?”
“Finding a parking garage?”
“Half the people I know in New York stayed in because of this so-called blizzard, like people who live a few blocks from here, I swear to God. You’d think it was nuclear fallout or something. New Yorkers are grateful for the impeccable excuse. They love natural disasters; it means everyone can stay in and not feel like they’re missing out on anything. But you make it.”
“Well, there’s never anything really going on in Boston.”
“You drove all the way from Boston?”
“Harriet, we live in Boston!”
“I know, I know.” Harriet made a frazzled noise. “I’m sorry, this whole week has been—” and Harriet’s face did a terrifying impression of this whole week.
Emily placed a calming hand on her friend’s shoulder. “I’m so happy for you. This is amazing. You look so great.”
She did, too. Harriet was wearing an odd bouquet of clothing and her hair was even longer now, but coiled atop her head. She managed to look both radiant and unsteady, like a tiny porcelain vase balancing on a stick. But where was the art?
Harriet said, “Emily, come here, you really have to meet Samir, my gallerist.”
“Do I, really?”
Harriet stopped, laughed. “Of course not, what am I fucking talking about! Jesus ladybird Christ. Shoot me. OK, calm down.”
Emily bent down and kissed Harriet’s forehead.
Harriet beamed. “I thought the Valium would take the edge off.” Whispering: “But maybe the coke put it back on? I think it’s going well. Let’s get some wine. You want some wine?”
“No, thanks.”
“Well, pretend you do. You have to hold something. Look, there’s Vulcan art slut Venetia Cole with the guy from Artforum. Come with me, Emily,” she said. “I’ve got to talk with some people. For the next twenty minutes you are not allowed to abandon me or judge me or let me out of your scientific sight.”
Emily followed.
Moments later, “People, this is Emily Phane, my sister slash BFF slash woman who kind of made this all possible. Some of you might remember me camping out in her creepy-ass house. Well, Emily here was the one who set that motherfucker on fire.”
—
“Where is it?” Emily finally asked. “The art, Harriet?”
“Where is my father, more like.”
Her father?
Harriet asked, “Were the roads really bad? He should have been here hours ago. He left around noon. He texted from Albany, what, twelve hours ago? Mom and Drew were like, No way we’re driving down in that for art.”
“Your father is coming to New York?”
“Can you believe it? He’s the real star here, anyway, you know.”
Emily did not know.
Except for on Facebook, Emily had not seen Mr. Jeffries since she left Route 29 for New York City, nearly five years ago. They were friends on Facebook.
The way Emily felt about Howie Jeffries went beyond missing him. She mourned him. She didn’t know why.
/> She kind of knew why.
They had not been able to maintain their friendship after Harriet had arrived; they no longer fit. It passed from them like a dream. They’d both woken up. It had freed Emily from Queens Falls, sent her packing. He had his daughter now. Emily had had nobody.
That time in Emily’s life was so difficult to reconcile with her life now, but sometimes she would wake at night, after an attack, say, or after Ethan shifted in bed, and she’d think that Mr. Jeffries was there next to her. Howie, she’d think. She’d remember the sound of his snoring, his protection. His intuitive hand pulling her safely out of hell.
Harriet had quickly realized that Emily and her father had not been romantically involved. But still, she rarely talked about that time either, which was odd for her. Emily, likewise, had minimized her time with Mr. Jeffries when discussing it with Ethan, who still assumed that it was Harriet who had saved Emily. “Harriet’s father helped me when I accidentally set my house on fire,” she’d told him. “Then Harriet came, as you know, and got me out of there, to New York City, to you, and…”
It was one of the few things she hadn’t been exactly honest with Ethan about.
Emily didn’t feel as if anything had been wrong with her relationship with Mr. Jeffries; just the opposite. It was more that she still didn’t know how to think about those few months—or, indeed, the years preceding them—and she didn’t want anyone else thinking about that time for her, telling her what happened, what any of it meant. It was hers, whatever it had been, and it was his too. She didn’t want anyone’s hands messing up her perfect friendship with Howie Jeffries.
OK, so Emily stalked him a little on Facebook. Once every few weeks, just checking it, picking through Howard Jeffries’s online trail, and sometimes she even posted things specifically for him to see. There was, for example, an entire article about how beige was the color of the season. She found amusing cartoons about fish. Her way of saying hey. He would, without fail, Like these posts. His way of saying OK.
Because he knew.
Two years ago, Mr. Jeffries sold his house on Route 29 to the same Wall Street lawyer who occupied Emily’s house. This happened around the same time that he had changed his Facebook status to “married.” It looked like he currently lived somewhere in the eighteenth century, near a pond.
But how happy he looked now in the over-Instagrammed selfies that Rhoda Jeffries constantly posted and tagged him in. Emily had only seen him that relaxed when he’d been asleep. He had a dog named Kevin. He did not have a boat named Richard. He had learned to ski. He’d gained weight. His face hadn’t exactly softened, but it was no longer the sort of thing you’d mistake for a cliff.
Harriet told Emily that the only time her father really mentioned anything about Emily was when, while packing up Emily’s stuff, he’d asked her if she could please maybe not mention to Rho that Emily had once stayed with him. Emily had been the first secret that Harriet and her father had ever shared. They’d bonded over Emily’s nonexistence.
Emily mourned Mr. Jeffries more than her grandfather. Peppy was less gone, in a sense, and Emily understood their time together, knowing that her life and happiness were testament to her grandfather. Her love for Peppy infused everything that she would ever do—and everyone she would ever love, from Ethan to the two children they would have together. Peppy was never far from any of them. Mr. Jeffries’s loss was more complex.
“Rho’s coming too,” Harriet said. “I forget, have you met Rho?”
“No,” Emily said.
“Rho is beyond the fucking pale. She’s like the upstate New York version of one of those prehistoric Venus figurines.”
“What?”
“Let me call him again,” Harriet said. She called her father. “Jesus,” she said. She wondered at her phone, held it ringing before her. “What the hell, Emily.”
“I’m sure he’s all right,” Emily said. “He’s an excellent driver.”
“Yeah,” Harriet said. “Yeah.” But she had clouded. “I’m worried. I’m stoned, actually, a little, but I’m also worried. Does one cancel out the other? Why won’t he answer?”
“I’ll try Ethan.”
“Nothing?” Harriet asked.
Emily shook her head. Stopped calling Ethan. Through the giant plate glass window you could hardly see the other side of the street now. It was the angriest that Emily had ever seen snow. They watched that.
“Maybe the lines are down?” Harriet supposed, quietly. “Do phones still work on lines? Maybe the satellites are down.”
Emily called Les French Flowers Deux. Boo, working late, answered; Emily talked to Boo for a short while. Yes, everything was OK, they’d arrived.
“Try someone in New York,” Emily suggested.
Harriet put the phone to her ear. On the other side of the room, ringing. “Hey, Asa,” Harriet said. “Everything cool over there?”
Asa looked up, saw Harriet and Emily. “You two considering this side of the room?” he asked.
They tried Mr. Jeffries again, and then Ethan, then Mr. Jeffries again. Then they agreed that they wouldn’t call for another fifteen minutes. Six minutes later they tried again. Still nothing.
—
Harriet led Emily into the darkened back room of the gallery. “Here it is,” she said. There were ten large screens, ten digital projections. Harriet said that it was called The Household Spirit.
“My father finally loaned me the money to finish it,” Harriet said. “Obviously. It’s about him, anyway. I wanted to keep it kind of a secret from you, so you could see it fresh. I filmed it back when you were in Brooklyn, you know, and I’ve been editing it, on and off, ever since. Nearly four years? It runs for a day or two, about thirty-eight hours straight.” She explained the project. Emily listened.
Harriet said, “But look, I think you’re just in time.”
“For what?”
They stood looking at the screens.
“He’s about to come home.”
—
On each screen a different view of Mr. Jeffries’s Route 29 house. It was night. It was autumn. The videos had been slowed down to way less than half speed. Trees dropped leaves in a slow, thick, watery wind. They took forever to reach the ground.
Emily stood alone, surrounded by Mr. Jeffries’s house. In front of her, beside her, behind her. She was both inside and outside: walled in by the outside of his house. Spatially, it was disorienting. Where was he? Emily needed to see him.
Emily sat on a cushion on the ground. She placed both of her palms on the ground. Every window in Mr. Jeffries’s house was open, lighted. One window per screen. Then there was a screen for the driveway. The roof. The doors. You could see perfectly inside each room, but the colors were off. Brighter than they should be. It took Emily a moment to realize that this wasn’t digital trickery—no, the entire house and everything in it and outside it, even the lawn, had been painted the same color as before, just a little bit brighter. The yellowish carpet was more yellowish, the sofa more whatever dull color the sofa was; even Timmy’s painting of Rogers Rock popped like a page from a comic book. The microwave. Mr. Jeffries’s tackle box and that clickety old “internet computer.” It looked like a cartoon of a memory or dream. It felt both empty and inhabited, dead and welcoming. Only the window to Harriet’s bedroom was closed, unlit. It was obvious that many of the cameras had been set up from Emily’s house, from her windows, roof, from the garden. Peppy’s house, she thought. Emily lived somewhere else now. She kept turning her head, looking for Mr. Jeffries.
Three minutes later, his car arrived.
It pulled into the driveway, spectral and slow. He was coming home from a night shift. Harriet had said that she’d asked him to behave for one day exactly as he normally would but to not look at the cameras or turn off any of the lights. The car moved from one screen, disappeared, then came to rest in another screen. The headlights died. It took Mr. Jeffries a minute to open the door, get out.
He stood.
/>
It was like watching a time-lapse video of an assassination. He sleepwalked into his house. Emily felt like she shouldn’t be seeing this, it was too intimate, but she couldn’t look away. She needed to see his face.
Emily was now completely on his time.
He moved from screen to screen. Emily had time to anticipate which screen the ghost would move into next and she adjusted her position accordingly, scooting herself in a circle around the room, thinking: As long as I can see him, he is safe. I must keep Howie safe. He went to the kitchen. Hovered. Opened the refrigerator and removed a can of ginger ale that Emily knew he hated. Like he was showing the camera, joking almost. He put it back. How he loved his daughter, Emily thought. This, finally, was his sailboat.
It took him twenty minutes to go upstairs. He disappeared for two minutes, probably while climbing the stairs, and Emily felt abandoned. The house became sinister, blaring with menace. She thought that anything could be hiding in there, waiting to hurt him.
Come back please.
He reappeared in the bathroom. He washed his face. He seemed to stare at his face for a long time, but Emily still couldn’t quite see it. He was the only thing colored normally, and that, of course, made him look faded, as if he were disappearing. He wouldn’t turn to her. Emily badly needed to see his face. Just one last time, she thought.
He brushed his teeth; and he flossed with the meticulousness of someone sewing up a wound. He continued to look at himself in the mirror, and leaves, outside the window, hung suspended in the air.
The bathroom mirror had been painted silver, Emily suddenly realized. There was no face looking back at Mr. Jeffries. But still he stared, as if the video had been paused.
He shut the bathroom lights off.
Emily gasped.
He wasn’t supposed to do that, was he? She waited. Perhaps he was going to the toilet, but Emily didn’t think so. She watched, for what felt like minutes, holding her breath, and there: she saw him.
Emily could just make him out, and she realized, with a jolt, that he’d been there the whole time. She had been looking right through him all that time. The shape of his head was discernible. Howard Jeffries standing in the dark of the bathroom at the window, looking out. Did he see in slow motion, too? Emily wondered if his sight had gone ahead, in real time, gazing out into the future while the world around him ground to a halt.